Managers will sometimes not help you because they are lazy. In a few cases culture will make them discriminate against you. However in general managers like you and want you to do well.
Any manager will let me go if their manager tells them to.
If you treat your managers like soulless entities and don’t build relationships with them, they’ll probably do the same to you. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.
When I was being recruited as a strategic early hire, one of my requirements was that I must report to the CTO/director and not a line level toothless engineering manager.
Also, every meaningful raise I’ve gotten has only come when I was reporting to someone above a line level manager.
>really anything that I care about - which is mainly “how much money do I get in exchange for my labor”
That's fair. Though I didn't choose my domain for the reasons you work. So I cared more about managers who felt like they were empathetic and invested their time to help me succeed. Not whoever can have me climb the corporate ladder the fastest.